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PRAGMATICS
1. Introduction
Pragmatics is often described as the study of language use, and contrasted with the
study of language structure. In this broad sense, it covers a range of loosely related
research programmes from formal studies of deictic expressions to sociological
studies of ethnic verbal stereotypes. In a more focused sense (the one we will use
here), pragmatics contrasts with semantics, the study of linguistic meaning, and is the
study of how contextual factors interact with linguistic meaning in the interpretation
of utterances. Here we will briefly highlight a range of closely related, fairly central
pragmatic issues and approaches that have been of interest to linguists and
philosophers of language in the past thirty years or so. Pragmatics, as we will describe
it, is an empirical science, but one with philosophical origins and philosophical
import.
The approaches to pragmatics we will consider here all accept as foundational two
ideas defended by Grice (Grice 1989, chapters 1-7; 14; 18) (for representative
collections, see Davis 1991; Kasher 1998; Horn & Ward 2004). The first is that
sentence meaning is a vehicle for conveying a SPEAKER’S MEANING, and that a speaker’s
meaning is an overtly expressed intention which is fulfilled by being recognised.1[1]
In developing this idea, Grice opened the way for an inferential alternative to the
classical code model of communication. According to the classical view, utterances
are signals encoding the messages that speakers intend to convey, and comprehension
is achieved by decoding the signals to obtain the associated messages. On the
inferential view, utterances are not signals but pieces of evidence about the speaker's
meaning, and comprehension is achieved by inferring this meaning from evidence
provided not only by the utterance but also by the context. An utterance is, of course,
a linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that comprehension involves an element
of decoding. How far does linguistic decoding take the hearer towards an
interpretation of the speaker’s meaning? Implicitly for Grice and explicitly for John
Searle (1969: 43), the output of decoding is normally a sense that is close to being
fully propositional, so that only reference assignment is needed to determine what is
said, and the main role of inference in comprehension is to recover what is implicated.
Following Recanati (2004a), we will call this a LITERALIST approach to semantics.
However, a major development in pragmatics over the past thirty years (going much
further than Grice envisaged) has been to show that the explicit content of an
utterance, like the implicit content, is largely underdetermined by the linguistically
encoded meaning, and its recovery involves a substantial element of pragmatic
inference. Following Recanati (2004a), we will call this a CONTEXTUALIST approach.
The second foundational idea defended by Grice is that, in inferring the
speaker’s meaning, the hearer is guided by the expectation that utterances should meet
Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
Quantity maxims
Quality maxims
Maxim of Relation
Be relevant.
Manner maxims
Supermaxim: Be perspicuous
4. Be orderly.
Do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the
world allows.
2[2] The wording of this maxim (and perhaps of the supermaxim of Manner) is a nice
illustration of Grice’s playfulness.
3[3] In this chapter, we will focus on the recovery of explicit truth-conditional content
and implicatures; for brief comments on the treatment of presupposition and
illocutionary force, see section 6 and footnote 15.
Produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your
communicational ends.
Each principle has a corollary for the audience (e.g. ‘Take it that the speaker made the
strongest statement consistent with what he knows’) which provides a heuristic for
hearers to use in identifying the speaker’s meaning.
The tactic adopted here is to examine some of the data that would, or should, be
covered by Grice’s quantity maxim and then propose a relatively simple formal
solution to the problem of describing the behaviour of that data. This solution may be
seen as a special case of Grice’s quantity maxim, or as an alternative to it, or as
merely a conventional rule for assigning one class of conversational meanings to one
class of utterances.
4[4] On generalised implicatures and the neo-Gricean approach, see Horn (1984,
1992, 2004, 2005); Levinson (1983, 1987, 2000); Hirschberg (1991); Carston (1995,
1998); Green (1995); Matsumoto (1995); Sperber & Wilson (1995).
5[5] Grice himself does not seem to have seen the distinction between generalised and
particularised implicatures as theoretically significant. For discussion, see Carston
(1995, 1998, 2002); Sperber & Wilson (1995); for experimental evidence on default
inference, see Noveck (2001); Chierchia et al. (2001); Bezuidenhout & Morris (2004);
Papafragou & Musolino (2003); Breheny, Katsos & Williams (2004.); Sperber &
Noveck (2004).
Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95; Carston 2002; Wilson & Sperber
2002, 2004), while still based on Grice’s two foundational ideas, departs from his
framework in two important respects. First, while Grice was mainly concerned with
the role of pragmatic inference in implicit communication, relevance theorists have
consistently argued that the explicit side of communication is just as inferential and
worthy of pragmatic attention as the implicit side (Wilson & Sperber 1981). This has
implications not only for the nature of explicit communication but also for semantics.
As noted above, Grice and others (e.g. Searle and Lewis) who have contributed to the
development of an inferential approach to communication have tended to minimise
the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. They treat sentences as
encoding something as close as possible to full propositions, and explicit
communication as governed by a maxim or convention of truthfulness, so that the
inference from sentence meaning to speaker’s meaning is simply a matter of assigning
referents to referring expressions, and perhaps of deriving implicatures. Relevance
theorists have argued that relevance-oriented inferential processes are efficient
enough to allow for a much greater slack between sentence meaning and speaker's
meaning, with sentence meaning typically being quite fragmentary and incomplete,
and speaker’s explicit meaning going well beyond the minimal proposition arrived at
by disambiguation and reference assignment.
Relevance theory starts from a detailed account of relevance and its role in
cognition. RELEVANCE is defined as a property of inputs to cognitive processes
(whether external stimuli, which can be perceived and attended to, or internal
representations, which can be stored, recalled, or used as premises in inference). An
input is relevant to an individual when it connects with available contextual
assumptions to yield POSITIVE COGNITIVE EFFECTS: for example, true contextual
implications, or warranted strengthenings or revisions of existing assumptions.
Everything else being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved, and
the smaller the mental effort required (to represent the input, access a context and
derive these cognitive effects), the greater the relevance of the input to the individual
at that time.
Relevance theory is based on two general claims about the role of relevance in
cognition and communication:
As noted above, these principles are descriptive rather than normative. The first, or
Cognitive, Principle of Relevance yields a variety of predictions about human
cognitive processes. It predicts that our perceptual mechanisms tend spontaneously to
pick out potentially relevant stimuli, our retrieval mechanisms tend spontaneously to
activate potentially relevant assumptions, and our inferential mechanisms tend
spontaneously to process them in the most productive way. This principle has
essential implications for human communication. In order to communicate, the
communicator needs her audience’s attention. If attention tends automatically to go to
what is most relevant at the time, then the success of communication depends on the
audience taking the utterance to be relevant enough to be worthy of attention.
Wanting her communication to succeed, the communicator, by the very act of
communicating, indicates that she wants the audience to see her utterance as relevant,
and this is what the Communicative Principle of Relevance states.
(b) It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and
preferences.
(a) Follow a path of least effort in constructing an interpretation of the utterance (and
in particular in resolving ambiguities and referential indeterminacies, in going
beyond linguistic meaning, in supplying contextual assumptions, computing
implicatures, etc.).
The Gricean, neo-Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches are not the only
theoretical approaches to pragmatics (even in the restricted sense of ‘pragmatics’ we
are using here). Important contributors to pragmatic theorising with original points of
view include Anscombre & Ducrot (1983); Asher & Lascarides (1995, 1998, 2003);
Bach (1987, 1994, 1999, 2001, 2004); Bach & Harnish (1979); Blutner & Zeevat
(2003); Clark (1977, 1993, 1996); Dascal (1981); Ducrot (1984); Fauconnier (1975,
1985, 1997); Harnish (1976, 1994); Hobbs (1979, 1985, 2004); Hobbs et al. (1993);
Kasher (1976, 1982, 1984, 1998); Katz (1977); Lewis (1979, 1983); Neale (1990,
1992, 2004, forthcoming); Recanati (1987, 1995, 2002, 2004a); Searle (1969, 1975,
1979); Stalnaker (1974, 1999); Sweetser (1990); Travis (1975. 2001); van der Auwera
(1981, 1985, 1997); van Rooy (1999); Vanderveken (1990-91). However, the
approaches outlined above are arguably the dominant ones.
In the rest of this chapter, we will briefly consider four main issues of current
interest to linguists and philosophers of language: literalism versus contextualism in
semantics (section 3), the nature of explicit truth-conditional content and the
borderline between explicit and implicit communication (section 4), lexical
pragmatics and the analysis of metaphor, approximation and narrowing (section 5),
and the communication of illocutionary force and other non-truth-conditional aspects
of meaning (section 6). We will end with some comments on the prospects for future
collaboration between philosophy and pragmatics.
Grice’s distinction between saying and implicating is a natural starting point for
examining the semantics-pragmatics distinction.6[6] One of Grice’s aims was to show
that his notion of speaker’s meaning could be used to ground traditional semantic
6[6] On the saying-implicating distinction, see Carston (2002: chapter 2.2); Wilson &
Sperber (2002: section 7); Recanati (2004a: chapter 1). For representative collections
on the semantics-pragmatics distinction, see Turner (1999); Szabo (2005).
notions such as sentence meaning and word meaning (Grice 1967/89: chapter 6). In
his framework, a speaker’s meaning is made up of what is said and (optionally) what
is implicated, and Grice sees sentence meaning as contributing to both. What a
speaker says is determined by truth-conditional aspects of linguistic meaning, plus
disambiguation, plus reference assignment. Thus, identifying what the speaker of (3)
has said would involve decoding the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence
uttered, disambiguating the ambiguous word ‘pupil’ and assigning reference to the
indexicals ‘I’ and ‘now’:
The resulting proposition is sometimes called the LITERAL MEANING of the utterance, or
the PROPOSITION EXPRESSED. Grice saw the truth-value of a declarative utterance like (3)
as depending on whether this proposition is true or false. By contrast, the meanings of
non-truth-conditional expressions such as ‘but’, ‘moreover’ or ‘so’ are seen as
contributing to what is CONVENTIONALLY IMPLICATED rather than what is said; in Grice’s
terms, conventional implicatures involve the performance of “higher-order” speech
acts such as contrasting, adding and explaining, which are parasitic on the “central,
basic” speech act of saying (Grice 1989: 359-368).7[7] For Grice, the semantics-
pragmatics distinction therefore cross-cuts the saying-implicating distinction, with
semantics contributing both to what is said and to what is implicated.
7[7] Karttunen & Peters (1979) extend Grice’s notion to other non-truth-conditional
items such as ‘even’. Blakemore (1987, 2002) and Bach (1999) criticise the notion of
conventional implicature and offer alternative accounts; on non-truth-conditional
meaning, see section 6.
semantics with a Gricean approach to pragmatics.8[8] The result was a division of
labour in which pragmatists concentrated on implicatures, semanticists concentrated
on literal meaning, and neither paid sufficient attention to potential pragmatic
contributions to the proposition expressed.
Even after disambiguation and reference assignment, sentences (4a) and (4b) are
semantically incomplete: in order to derive a complete, truth-evaluable proposition,
8[8] Hedges are necessary because Grice does occasionally suggest that what is said
may go beyond the literal meaning. See his comments on “dictiveness without
formality” in Grice (1989: 361).
the hearer of (4a) must decide what the speaker is claiming the sea is too cold for, and
the hearer of (4b) must decide whether the speaker is describing the book as difficult
to read, understand, write, review, sell, find, etc., and by comparison to what. It is
quite implausible that these aspects of truth-conditional content are determined by
purely linguistic rules or conventions, and fairly implausible that they are determined
merely by assigning values to linguistically-specified variables. Given an inferential
system rich enough to disambiguate, assign reference and compute implicatures, it is
more natural (and parsimonious) to treat the output of semantics as a highly schematic
logical form, which is fleshed out into fully propositional form by pragmatic
inferences that go well beyond what is envisaged on a literalist approach. The result is
a division of labour in which semanticists deal with decoded meaning, pragmatists
deal with inferred meaning, and pragmatic inference makes a substantial contribution
to truth-conditional content.
5c. If you leave your window open and a burglar gets in, you have no right to
compensation.
10[10] For accounts along these lines, see Sperber & Wilson (1986/95, 1998a);
Carston (1988, 2002); Recanati (1989, 2004a); Wilson & Sperber (2002); Neale
(2004, forthcoming). Alternative, more literalist accounts, have been defended in
Stanley (2000, 2002); Stanley & Szabó (2000).
4. Explicit and implicit communication
On a standard Gricean account, what Lisa has said in uttering (6b) is that she has
eaten something or other at some time or other. However, what she would normally
be understood as asserting is something stronger: namely, that she has eaten supper on
the evening of utterance. Inferential elaborations of this type, which seem to be
performed automatically and unconsciously during comprehension, are ruled out by
Grice’s account of what is said.
The term ‘explicature’ was introduced into relevance theory, on the model of
Grice's ‘implicature’, to characterise the speaker’s explicit meaning in a way that
allows for richer elaboration than Grice’s notion of ‘what is said’:
The process of DEVELOPING a logical form may involve not only reference assignment
but other types of pragmatic enrichment illustrated in (4)-(6). The implicatures of an
utterance are all the other propositions that make up the speaker’s meaning:
All four answers communicate not only the same overall meaning but also the same
explicature and implicatures. If this is not immediately obvious, there is a standard
test for deciding whether some part of the speaker’s meaning is part of the explicit
truth-conditional content of the utterance or merely an implicature. The test involves
checking whether the item falls within the scope of logical operators when embedded
into a negative or conditional sentence: explicit truth-conditional content falls within
the scope of negation and other logical operators, while implicatures do not (Carston
2002: chapter 2.6.3). Thus, consider the hypothesis that the explicature of (6b) is
simply the trivial truth that Lisa has eaten something at some point before the time of
utterance, and that she is merely implicating that she has eaten that evening. The
standard embedding test suggests that this hypothesis is false. If Lisa had replied ‘I
haven't eaten’, she would clearly not have been asserting that she has never eaten in
11[11] We are considering here only what we call basic or first-level explicatures. We
also claim that there are higher-level explicatures incorporating speech-act or
propositional-attitude information; for comments, see section 6.
her life, but merely denying that she has eaten supper that very evening. So in
replying ‘I've eaten,’ Lisa is explicitly communicating that she has eaten supper that
very evening.
Although all four answers in (6b-e) convey the same explicature, there is a clear
sense in which Lisa’s meaning is least explicit in (6b) and most explicit in (6e), with
(6c) and (6d) falling in between. These differences in DEGREE OF EXPLICITNESS are
analysable in terms of the relative proportions of decoding and inference involved:
The greater the relative contribution of decoding, and the smaller the relative
contribution of pragmatic inference, the more explicit an explicature will be (and
inversely).
When the speaker’s meaning is quite explicit, as in (6e), and in particular when each
word in an utterance is used to convey one of its encoded meanings, what we are
calling the explicature is close to what might be commonsensically described as the
explicit content, or what is said, or the literal meaning of the utterance. The less
explicit the meaning, the more responsibility the hearer must take for the
interpretation he constructs: in relevance-theoretic terms, explicatures may be
STRONGER or WEAKER, depending on the degree of indeterminacy introduced by the
inferential aspect of comprehension. Whether the explicature is strong or weak, the
notion of explicature applies straightforwardly. However, the same is not true of the
notions of literal meaning and what is said. When asked what Lisa has said by
uttering (6b) (‘I’ve eaten’) with a relatively weak explicature, people’s intuitions
typically waver. The weaker the explicature, the harder it is to paraphrase what the
speaker was saying except by transposing it into an indirect quotation (‘She said she
had eaten’), which is always possible but does not really help to specify the content of
what was communicated. In such cases, the notions of explicature and degrees of
explicitness have clear advantages over the traditional notions of literal meaning and
what is said.12[12]
According to our account, the recovery of both explicit and implicit content may
involve a substantial element of pragmatic inference. This raises questions about how
explicatures and implicatures are identified, and where the borderline between them is
drawn. We have argued that the linguistically-encoded meaning of an utterance gives
no more than a schematic indication of the speaker’s meaning. The hearer’s task is to
use this indication, together with background knowledge, to construct an
interpretation of the speaker’s meaning, guided by expectations of relevance raised by
the utterance itself. This overall task can be broken down into a number of sub-tasks:
These sub-tasks should not be thought of as sequentially ordered. The hearer does not
first decode the sentence meaning, then construct an explicature and identify an
A crucial point about the relation between explicatures and implicatures is that
implicated conclusions must be deducible from explicatures together with an
appropriate set of contextual assumptions. A hearer using the relevance-theoretic
comprehension heuristic is therefore entitled to follow a path of least effort in
developing the encoded schematic sentence meaning to a point where it combines
with available contextual assumptions to warrant the derivation of enough conclusions
to make the utterance relevant in the expected way. This is what happens in Lisa’s
utterance (6b) (repeated below):
Lisa’s utterance ‘No thanks’ should raise a doubt in Alan’s mind about why she is
refusing his invitation, and he can reasonably expect the next part of her utterance to
settle this doubt by offering an explanation of her refusal. From encyclopaedic
information associated with the concept EATING, he should find it relatively easy to
supply the contextual assumptions in (7):
7a. People don’t normally want to eat supper twice in one evening.
7b. The fact that one has already eaten supper on a given evening is a good reason for
refusing an invitation to supper that evening.
These would suggest an explanation of Lisa’s refusal, provided that the encoded
meaning of her utterance is enriched to yield an explicature along the lines in (8):
By combining (7) and (8), Alan can derive the implicated conclusion that Lisa is
refusing his invitation because she has already had supper that evening (which may in
turn lead on to further implications), thus satisfying his expectations of relevance. On
this approach, explicatures and implicatures are constructed by mutually adjusting
tentative hypotheses about explicatures, implicated premises and implicated
conclusions in order to satisfy the expectations of relevance raised by the utterance
itself.13[13]
13[13] On the explicit-implicit distinction in relevance theory, see Sperber & Wilson
(1986/95: chapter 4.2, 4.4); Carston (2002: chapter 2.3); Wilson & Sperber (2004).
For a more detailed analysis of the mutual adjustment process for (6b), see Wilson &
Sperber (2002, Table 1).
In interpreting Sue’s utterance in (9b), Bill will expect it to be relevant to his
preceding remark, for instance by disputing it, elaborating on it, or answering a
question it raises (e.g. ‘Why did you move?’). In ordinary circumstances, the easiest
way to arrive at a sufficiently relevant interpretation (and hence at the interpretation
favoured by the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic) would involve
interpreting ‘the rent’ to mean the rent in Brooklyn, and ‘cheaper’ to mean cheaper
than in Manhattan.14[14] (9b), so understood and combined with an assumption such
as (10), provides the answer to an implicit question raised by Bill:
Of course, not everyone would be prepared to move in order to get a lower rent, and
Bill may not have known in advance whether Sue would or not; in Lewis’s terms, in
interpreting her utterance he may have to ACCOMMODATE an assumption such as (10). In
the relevance-theoretic framework, what Lewis calls accommodation involves adding
a new (i.e. previously unevidenced or under-evidenced) premise to the context in the
course of the mutual adjustment process geared to satisfying the hearer’s expectations
of relevance. Which premises are added will depend on the order in which they can be
constructed, via a combination of backwards inference from expected conclusions and
forward inference from information available in memory. By encouraging the hearer
to supply some such premises in the search for relevance, the speaker takes some
responsibility for their truth.15[15]
11d. The relative benefit of living in Manhattan rather than Brooklyn was not worth
the high rent Sue was paying.
The implicated conclusion that Bill will derive from Sue’s utterance depends on the
particular implicated premise he supplies. Still, it is clearly part of Sue’s intention that
Bill should provide some such premise and derive some such conclusion. In other
words, Sue’s overall meaning has a clear gist, but not an exact paraphrase. The greater
the range of alternatives, the WEAKER the implicatures, and the more responsibility the
hearer has to take for the particular choices he makes. Much of human communication
is weak in this sense, a fact that a pragmatic theory should explain rather than idealise
away.
However, he did not pursue the idea, or suggest how the indeterminacy of
implicatures might be compatible with their calculability, which he also regarded as
an essential feature. In the Gricean and neo-Gricean literature, this problem is
generally idealised away:
Relevance theory argues that indeterminacy is quite pervasive at both explicit and
implicit levels, and provides an analysis that fits well with Grice’s intuitive
description.
The claim that an utterance does not encode the speaker’s meaning but is merely a
piece of evidence for it has implications at the lexical level. Metaphors and other
tropes are the most obvious cases where the meaning conveyed by use of a word goes
beyond the linguistically encoded sense. Relevance theory gives a quite different
account of these lexical pragmatic phenomena from the standard Gricean one. Gricean
pragmatics is often seen as having shed new light on the distinction between literal
and figurative meaning. The distinction goes back to classical rhetoric, where it was
assumed that (in modern terms):
(c) Literal meanings are primary; figurative meanings are produced by systematic
departures from literal meaning along dimensions such as similarity (in the case of
metaphor), part-whole relationships (in the case of synecdoche), contradiction (in
the case of irony) and so on.
(d) Figurative meanings are paraphrasable in literal terms, and can therefore be
literally conveyed.
Grice’s account of tropes is closer to the classical than the Romantic approach.
Suppose that the speaker of (12) or (13) manifestly could not have intended to commit
herself to the truth of the propositions literally expressed: it is common knowledge
that she knows that John is not a computer, or that she thinks it is bad weather:
She is therefore overtly violating Grice’s first maxim of Quality (‘Do not say what
you believe to be false’). According to Grice, such overt violation or FLOUTING of a
maxim indicates a speaker's intention: the speaker intends the hearer to retrieve an
implicature which brings the full interpretation of the utterance (i.e. what is said plus
what is implicated) as close as possible to satisfying the Cooperative Principle and
maxims. In the case of tropes, the required implicature is related to what is said in one
of several possible ways, each characteristic of a different trope. With metaphor, the
implicature is a simile based on what is said; with irony, it is the opposite of what is
said; with hyperbole, it is a weaker proposition, and with understatement, a stronger
one.16[16] Thus, Grice might analyse (12) as implicating (14) below, and (13) as
implicating (15):
As in the classical rhetorical approach, literal meanings are primary, and figurative
meanings are associated with literal meanings in simple and systematic ways. What
Grice adds is the idea that figurative meanings are derived in the pragmatic process of
utterance comprehension and that this derivation is triggered by the fact the literal
interpretation is an overt departure from conversational maxims.
16[16] Here we will consider metaphor and related phenomena. For analyses of irony
and understatement, see Sperber & Wilson (1981, 1986: Chapter 4.7, 4.9, 1990;
1998b); Wilson & Sperber (1992).
sentence she utters literally means (Grice 1967/89: 34). But in that case, since nothing
is genuinely said, the first Quality maxim is not violated at all, and an account in
terms of overt violation does not go through.
A Gricean way to go (although Grice himself did not take this route) would be to
argue that what is violated is not the first maxim of Quality but the first maxim of
Quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’), since if nothing is
said, no information is provided. The implicature could then be seen as part of an
overall interpretation that satisfies this maxim. However, this creates a further
problem, since the resulting interpretations of figurative utterances would irretrievably
violate the Manner maxims. In classical rhetoric, where a metaphor such as (12) or an
irony such as (13) is merely an indirect and decorative way of communicating the
propositions in (14) or (15), this ornamental value might help to explain the use of
tropes (in so far as classical rhetoricians were interested in explanation at all). Quite
sensibly, Grice does not appeal to ornamental value. His supermaxim of Manner is
not ‘Be fancy’ but ‘Be perspicuous.’ However, he does assume, in accordance with
classical rhetoric, that figurative meanings, like literal meanings, are fully
propositional, and paraphrasable in literal terms. Which raises the following question:
isn't a direct and literal expression of what you mean always more perspicuous (and in
particular less obscure and less ambiguous, cf. the first and second Manner maxims)
than an indirect figurative expression?
There are deeper problems with any attempt (either classical or Gricean) to treat
language use as governed by a norm of literalness, and figurative utterances as overt
departures from the norm. Apart from creative literary metaphors and aggressive
forms of irony, which are indeed meant to be noticed, ordinary language use is full of
tropes that are understood without attracting any more attention than strictly literal
utterances. This familiar observation has now been experimentally confirmed:
reaction-time studies show that most metaphors take no longer to understand than
their literal counterparts (Gibbs 1994; Glucksberg 2001; see also Noveck et al. 2001).
This does not square with the view that the hearer of a metaphor first considers its
literal interpretation, then rejects it as blatantly false or incongruous, and then
constructs a figurative interpretation.
Moreover, while there is room for argument about which metaphors are noticed
as such and which are not, ordinary discourse is full of utterances which would violate
the first maxim of Quality if literally understood, but are not perceived as violations
by ordinary language users. We are thinking here of approximations and loose uses of
language such as those in (16)-(19) (discussed in greater detail in Wilson & Sperber
2002):
If the italicised expressions in (16)–(19) are literally understood, these utterances are
not strictly true: lectures rarely start at exactly the appointed time, Holland is not a
plane surface, Sue must hurry to the bank but not necessarily run there, and other
brands of disposable tissue would do just as well for Jane. Despite the fact that hearers
do not normally perceive them as literally false, such loose uses of language are not
misleading. This raises a serious issue for any philosophy of language based on a
maxim or convention of truthfulness. In some cases, it could be argued that the words
are in fact ambiguous, with a strict sense and a more general sense, both known to
competent language users. For instance, the word ‘Kleenex’, originally a brand name,
may also have come to mean, more generally, a disposable tissue. However, such
ambiguities ultimately derive from repeated instances in which the original brand
name is loosely used. If ‘Kleenex’ now has TISSUE as one of its lexical senses, it is
because the word was often loosely used to convey this broader meaning before it
became lexicalised.
Do we need four different kinds of analysis for literal, vague, loose, and figurative
meanings? Relevance theory is unique in proposing a unified account of all these
cases. From the general claim that an utterance is a piece of evidence about the
speaker’s meaning, it follows, at the lexical level, that the function of words in an
utterance is not to encode but merely to indicate the concepts that are constituents of
the speaker’s meaning. We are not denying that words do encode concepts (or at least
semantic features), and that they are (at least partly) decoded during the
comprehension process; however, we are claiming that the output of decoding is
merely a point of departure for identifying the concepts intended by the speaker. The
presence in an utterance of an expression with a given sense licenses a variety of
(typically non-demonstrative) inferences. Some of these inferences contribute to
satisfying the hearer’s expectations of relevance, and are therefore drawn. Others
don’t, and aren’t. In the process, there is a mutual adjustment between explicatures
and implicatures. The decoded content helps to identify the inferences that make the
utterance relevant as expected, and is readjusted so as to warrant just those inferences
that contribute to the relevance of the utterance as a whole. In particular, the
constituent concepts of the explicature are constructed ad hoc, starting from the
linguistically encoded concepts, but quite often departing from them so as to optimise
the relevance of the overall interpretation (Carston 1997, 2002: chapter 5; Sperber &
Wilson 1998a; Wilson & Sperber 2002; Wilson 2003).
Suppose, for instance, you have a lecture one afternoon, but don’t know exactly
when it is due to start. You are told, ‘The lecture starts at five o’clock.’ From this
utterance, and in particular from the phrase ‘at five o’clock’, together with contextual
premises, you can draw a number of inferences that make the utterance relevant to
you: that you will not be free to do other things between five and seven o’clock, that
you should leave the library no later than 4.45, that it will be too late to go shopping
after the lecture, and so on. None of these inferences depends on ‘five o’ clock’ being
strictly understood. There are inferences that depend on a strict interpretation (for
instance, that the lecture will have begun by 5.01), but they don’t contribute to the
relevance of the utterance, and you don’t draw them. According to the relevance-
theoretic approach, you then take the speaker to be committed to the truth of a
proposition that warrants just the implications you did derive, a proposition which
might be paraphrased, say, as ‘The lecture starts between five o’clock and ten past,’
but which you, the hearer, would have no need to try and formulate exactly in your
mind. Note that if the speaker had uttered the more accurate ‘between five o’clock
and ten past’ instead of the approximation ‘at five o’clock,’ the overall effort required
for comprehension would have been increased rather than reduced, since you would
have had to process a longer sentence and a more complex meaning without any
saving on the inferential level. Note, too, that we cannot explain how this
approximation is understood by assuming that the standard of precision in force
allows for, say, a variation of ten minutes around the stated time. If the lecture might
start ten minutes earlier than five o’clock, then the inferences worth drawing would
not be the same.
In each case, the encoded sense of ‘computer’ draws the hearer’s attention to some
features of computers that they may share with some human beings. Like the best
accountants, computers can process large amounts of numerical information and
never make mistakes, and so on. Unlike good friends, computers lack emotions, and
so on. In each case, Peter builds an ad hoc concept indicated, though not encoded, by
the word ‘computer’, such that John’s falling under this concept has implications that
answer the question in (20a) or (21a). Note that Mary need not have in mind the
precise implications that Peter will derive, as long as her utterance encourages him to
derive the kind of implications that answer his question along the intended lines. So
the Romantics were right to argue that the figurative meaning of a live metaphor
cannot be properly paraphrased. However, this is not because the meaning is some
non-truth-conditional set of associations or ‘connotations’. It is because it consists of
an ad hoc concept that is characterised by its inferential role and not by a definition,
and moreover this inferential role, to a much greater extent than in the case of mere
approximations, is left to the hearer to elaborate. Metaphorical communication is
relatively weak communication.
In the case of approximations or metaphors, concept construction results in a
broadening of the encoded concept; in other cases, as in (5a) (‘I’ll bring a bottle’) and
(6b) above, it results in a narrowing. Recall that in (6), Lisa has dropped by her
neighbours, the Joneses, who have just sat down to supper:
Speech-act theorists such as Austin, Searle, Katz and Bach & Harnish underlined
the fact that a speaker’s meaning should be seen not merely as a set of (asserted)
propositions, but as a set of propositions each with a recommended propositional
attitude or illocutionary force. The treatment of illocutionary and attitudinal meaning
has developed in parallel to the treatment of explicit truth-conditional content, with
early literalist accounts replaced by more contextualist accounts in which the role of
speakers’ intentions and pragmatic inference is increasingly recognised.17[17] In
relevance theory, these non-truth-conditional aspects of speaker’s meaning are
analysed as HIGHER-LEVEL explicatures constructed (like the basic explicatures
considered in section 4) by development of encoded schematic sentence meanings. In
uttering (22), for example, Mary might convey not only the basic explicature in (23a),
17[17] See e.g. Strawson (1964); Searle (1969, 1975); Katz (1977); Recanati (1987);
Tsohatzidis (1994); Sadock (2004).
which constitutes the explicit truth-conditional content of her utterance, but a range of
higher-level explicatures such as (23b-d) (any of which might contribute to overall
relevance):
23b. Mary is telling Peter confidentially that she didn’t enjoy the meal.
23c. Mary is admitting confidentially to Peter that she didn’t enjoy the meal.
Finally, a range of items such as ‘even’, ‘still’, ‘but’, ‘indeed’, ‘also’ and ‘after
all’, which have been seen as encoding information about ‘presuppositions’,
conventional implicatures or argumentative orientation instead of (or as well as)
descriptive information,18[18] may be analysed as restricting the search space for
implicated premises and conclusions, or as indicating what type of inferential process
the hearer is intended to go through in establishing relevance. To give just one
illustration, compare (26a) and (26b):
As these examples show, although ‘and’ and ‘but’ are descriptively equivalent, they
orient the hearer towards different types of interpretation (Ducrot 1984; Blakemore
1987, 2002; Hall 2004). The use of ‘and’ in (26a), for example, is compatible with an
interpretation in which the fact that John enjoys detective stories is unsurprising given
that he is a philosopher, while the use of ‘but’ in (26b) suggests an interpretation in
which the fact that John is a philosopher makes it surprising that he enjoys detective
stories. The effect of ‘but’ is to narrow the search space for inferential comprehension
by facilitating access to certain types of context or conclusion: it may therefore be
seen, like mood indicators and indexicals, as indicating a rather abstract property of
the speaker’s meaning: the direction in which relevance is to be sought.19[19]
The few attempts that have been made to provide a unified account of indicators
have been based on the speech act distinction between conditions on USE and
18[18] See for example Stalnaker (1974); Wilson (1975); Gazdar (1979); Karttunen &
Peters (1979); Grice (1981); Anscombre & Ducrot (1983), Sperber & Wilson
(1986/95: chapter 4.5); Blakemore (1987, 2002); Wilson & Sperber (1993); Bruxelles,
Ducrot & Raccah (1995); Horn (1996); Kadmon (2001); Atlas (2004); Hall (2004);
Iten (forthcoming).
19[19] For an account of interjections within this framework, see Wharton 2003.
conditions on TRUTH (Recanati 2004b). However, as noted above, not all indicators are
analysable in speech-act terms, and the distinction between conditions on truth and
conditions on use runs the risk of becoming trivial or non-explanatory when removed
from the speech-act framework. While it is clear why certain acts have felicity
conditions (e.g. only someone with the appropriate authority can give an order,
perform a baptism, and so on), it is not clear why linguistic expressions such as ‘it’
and ‘that’, or ‘even’ and ‘also’, which have no obvious analysis in speech-act terms,
should have conditions on their appropriate use. By contrast, if the function of
indicators is to contribute to inferential comprehension by guiding the hearer towards
the speaker’s meaning, the conditions on their use fall out as a natural consequence.
More generally, from a radical literalist perspective, it is surprising to find any items
at all that contribute to meaning without encoding concepts. From the perspective
outlined in this chapter, there is no presumption that all linguistic meaning should be
either conceptual or truth-conditional: the only requirement on linguistic meaning is
that it guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning by indicating the direction in
which relevance is to be sought.
7. Conclusion
When pragmatics emerged as a distinct discipline at the end of the 1960s, analytic
philosophy was dominated by philosophy of language, and the cognitive sciences
were still in their infancy. Since then, as the cognitive sciences have matured and
expanded, priority in philosophy has shifted from philosophy of language to
philosophy of mind. The development of pragmatics reflects this shift. Part of Grice’s
originality was to approach meaning as a primarily psychological phenomenon and
only derivatively a linguistic one. By underlining the gap between sentence meaning
and speaker’s meaning, he made it possible, of course, for ideal language
philosophers to ignore many context-dependent features of speaker's meaning that
ordinary language philosophers had used as evidence against formal approaches.
However, far from claiming that linguistic meaning was the only type of meaning
amenable to scientific treatment and worthy of philosophical attention, he suggested
that speaker's meaning was relevant to philosophy and could be properly studied in its
own right. As pragmatics has developed, it has become increasingly clear that the gap
between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning is wider than Grice himself
thought, and that pragmatic inference contributes not only to implicit content but also
to truth-conditional aspects of explicit content. While the effect may be to remove
from linguistic semantics more phenomena than some semanticists might be willing
to relinquish, it does not make the field any less challenging: in fact, the semantics-
pragmatics interface becomes an interesting interdisciplinary area of research in its
own right. However, as the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning
widens, it increasingly brings into question a basic assumption of much philosophy of
language, that the semantics of sentences provides straightforward, direct access to
the structure of human thoughts. We have argued that linguistic meanings are mental
representations that play a role at an intermediate stage in the comprehension process.
Unlike speaker's meanings (which they resemble in the way a skeleton resembles a
body), linguistic meanings are not consciously entertained. In other words, whereas
speakers’ meanings are salient objects in personal psychology, linguistic meanings
only play a role in sub-personal cognition.
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